Building organisational WCAG maturity through accessibility audits

Here at Deakin University Library we aim to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA compliance. We try to embed accessibility into everything we do, but we have challenges:

• we have dozens of platforms serving up content to our students, researchers, staff, and community
• we have better visibility of accessibility compliance across some platforms over others
• we struggle to have a 'bird's eye' view of the current state of accessibility across our complex digital ecosystem
• we are dependent on auto-generated reports, which are limited in what criteria they can assess

Sound familiar? To address these challenges, we decided to conduct a multi-platform accessibility audit across 16 of our content platforms and use the results to identify, implement and advocate for improvements.

Some amazing bonuses of the approach we took include:

• developing a repeatable process and toolkit for future audits,
• increased awareness amongst library colleagues and platform managers around accessibility, and
• some deep team capability growth in accessibility testing, reporting, tools and techniques.

This presentation will unpack drivers, decision points, process and outcomes of our approach. Plus we’ll share some tips and tools for doing this in other organisations!